Turns out that The University of Maryland Department of Geography has already done a land cover classification project, which highlights urban areas very well! You’d think that would make me feel quite bad, after spending much of last week trying to do this BUT unfortunately their project used AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer) data which has a larger resolution than LandSat and the data is older. But there is still an awful lot of analysis I can do with 20 year old 1km resolution data, if nothing else I can try to use some of their methods with the more up to date LandSat data I was using before.

So this is how to download, import into Qgis and use the AVHRR Land Cover Data

Firstly go to http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/data/landcover/ for some info on the whole project, click on the Download via Search and Preview Tool (ESDI) if you want to browse the World and select the data you want OR head straight to the FTP server. Choose your area, projection and resolution (I’m using North America, LatLong and 1km), eventually you will be presented with a bunch of files from which we download the file ending asc.gz as Qgis can handle this not the bsq.gz. Extract the file after downloading and boot up Qgis. Now hit ‘Add a Raster Layer’ and select the .asc file you downloaded and extracted, the file will be pretty big (NA is 1.39 GB) so expect a wait. Now you will have a greyscale image of your region, the brightness depends on the land cover classification calculated by UMD. Here are the code values which can be found on their website.

Code Values for 1km and 8km data

Value

Label

RGB Red

RGB Green

RGB Blue

0

Water

068

079

137

1

Evergreen Needleleaf Forest

001

100

000

2

Evergreen Broadleaf Forest

001

130

000

3

Deciduous Needleleaf Forest

151

191

071

4

Deciduous Broadleaf Forest

002

220

000

5

Mixed Forest

000

255

000

6

Woodland

146

174

047

7

Wooded Grassland

220

206

000

8

Closed Shrubland

255

173

000

9

Open Shrubland

255

251

195

10

Grassland

140

072

009

11

Cropland

247

165

255

12

Bare Ground

255

199

174

13

Urban and Built

000

255

255

To make the map in Qgis look at all interesting we need to apply a colormap algorithm. You can select your own by right clicking the file and selecting properties and changing the settings or go to properties select ‘Load Style’ and load the style I created which can be downloaded here (right click and ‘Save target as’). Now you will have a wonderful map showing land use in your region, the area highlighted in white is what I am particuarly interested in and worked on for much of last week. The next step is to see if I can work out how to generate the code values easily and apply it to LandSat data, then compare to OSM.